You also program in Ruby, right? Three languages! Can you contrast the 3 languages Scala, Clojure and Ruby? That’s a very interesting thing to think about, because Clojure and Ruby have sort of a similar feel in the sense that they are both more dynamically typed than statically typed. Clojure has an interesting relationship with Java, obviously, because it lets you use Java objects, but it doesn’t have type annotations all over the place, like you would have in Java or Scala. I think this general debate of static versus dynamic typing is kind of pointless in some sense, meaning that a lot of times it’s the application that really should dictate what’s best.If you are building something like a typical website that may need a lot of iterations very quickly and there is an informal model of the domain, then maybe it’s not so important to have the formalism of type theory. But, on the other hand, if you are building something that you wanted to behave in a mathematically precise way, then it’s great to have it. They type system of statically language that bakes in the almost provably correct behavior, at the fundamental building blocks. For example, if I’m building a financial application that manages money in some sense, I’d be more likely to want a statically typed language like Scala where I can very precisely specify the behavior of money. Then, build my account objects and so forth on top of that, knowing that they will be robust at this very fundamental level. But, if I’m building a website, where users may be specifying withdrawals...

Zan did a great job of comparing several payment gateways in Singapore. In summary, below are what i found to be important. Available Options in Singapore: Paypal Website Payment Standard Paypal Payflow Gateway E-Nets E-Clearing World Pay Payment Express Cybersource 2c2p Cost Comparison World Pay Enets Paypal Payment express Set up fees S$250 S$200 Free S$150 Annual fees S$650 S$450 Free S$600 Transaction fees 4.50% 4.50% 3.4% + S$0.50 100 free transactions, S$0.50 per transaction thereafter Final Decision? Eventually, we decided to use Paypal Website Payment Standard. Why? First, the cost is the lowest. There are no set up fees or monthly fees. You only pay when there’re purchases. Second, the process is easy to set up. All I needed is a credit card. Applying for a merchant account at the banks is a hassle in comparison. There is processing time, and added charges for the set up can be quite...

About The Neo4j Graph Database Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, stores data in graphs rather than relational tables. This makes Neo4j especially suitable for applications that handle data with complex relationships, like social networks, life sciences, intelligence and financial applications. Neo4j offers users: extremely high performance on deep traversals and mining of complex data, rapid schema evolution for changing business requirements, and simplified development through perfect match between domain model and database schema. These advantages make Neo4j the most effective database choice by many social networking services and other applications that manage ever more complex business data. via blogs.neotechnology.com * Reading Linked * Exploring Neo4j * Thinking of using Neo4j in one of my current...

Scott: As you mentioned, there is an Apache version of Hadoop and then there’s the Cloudera version. As different companies wrap themselves around different open source projects, they’re structured in different ways. Talk a little bit about Cloudera and what you add to the public open source version of Hadoop, in terms of additional software, support, or services. Amr: I should start by saying that Cloudera is an enterprise software company. Open source is an enabler for us, and it’s part of what we do, but our mission is about building enterprise software for large-scale data processing in internal or external clouds. via...

The group at Yahoo! that I came from was using Hadoop for data analytics and data warehousing. We had something like 100,000 web servers across the world, and once we collected data from across all these servers, we dumped it into Hadoop, which became the place where we stored all of the data, instead of traditional network storage. Our reasoning for doing that was a matter of economics, given the quantity of hardware. Hadoop lets us scalably process that data, clean it up, and normalize it so we could pass it along to the systems that need it. Hadoop is getting very wide adoption in the data warehousing and business intelligence domains. One of the biggest uses within Yahoo! right now is dealing with all of the log information from servers. Analyzing that information allows for better spam filtering, ad targeting, content targeting, A/B testing for new features, et cetera. It’s not web-specific. For example, everybody does data warehousing, and we see very strong adoption there. Separate from that, your example of oil companies is a very good one, as is the financial sector. Right now, we do have a couple of very large financial institutions working with us on these exact problems, taking huge amounts of data from domains like credit card processing and building predictive models for fraud that enable better decisions, for example, about whether to block or allow a given transaction. In the stock market, Hadoop is being used to do simulations that help predict option pricing and related problems. That’s another very healthy market that we’ve seen growth in. via howsoftwareisbuilt.com Knowing that Yahoo...